Sometimes there is a bit of shame, in the last few weeks I have been practicing and recording improvisations. When you are trying ideas for the first time peculiar things happen. Today for example, playing along with my eyes closed I could have sworn my fingers were at the 2nd fret but they were really at the 5th. Other times I began to play a line that was clear for the first few notes then got fuzzy, resulting in lots of clicks and confusion. At times I have taken the Miles Davis approach – “there are no mistakes”. I just repeat the click and try to make it a feature of the passage.

As you learn and work on a piece of music the narrative flow becomes the driving force for an interpretation. Sometimes it takes a very long time to find the best way to deliver a passage. Yesterday I was playing one of my own pieces, a fairly easy one, and realized I was rushing into a section, that it needed to start more like coming into a turn while driving before speeding up. It seemed so obvious as this registered and now I have to figure out why it took so long to discover that basic notion.